This week we’ve focused most of our attention on breathing some life into Seasonné, also known as the Winterland. Besides progressing the main quest, there hasn’t been much to do besides bashing Frostlings and Yetis. We’ve tried to change this by adding 4 new side quests, as well as opening up all cave areas for you guys to explore.

We’re aiming to update the Frontline beta during the weekend with the new quests, paired together with some balancing changes to Arcade mode. As always, we would love your feedback on everything and anything so keep your eyes open later during the week!

Beyond Seasonné, Vilya has worked diligently to finish up the last missing portraits for the final cut scenes of the Temple of Seasons. This should (which often means it’s not) be the last of them from this area. Hurray!

She’s also kept up with the Achievement icons from last week:

Fred has had a break from the skills this week and been mainly busy with animations for the new side quests. Below are a few of said animations, including one were Santa brutally dies from eating a Christmas cookie laced with nitroglycerin (or does he??).

This week, Vilya has spent a lot of her time working on a piece of promotional artwork that we’ll use on Steam (among other places):

Still a bit unsure whether the pillar will look like this in the end – we’ve been playing around with various enemies & player character combinations so that might still change. We also might add additional pillars in the distance of the background.. We’ll see!

We also started doing some work on Steam Achievements! All achievements in the game will be available as achievements on Steam as well, so we had to edit the icons to fit those dimensions:

Fred, in the meanwhile, has kept working on the skills. The Frosty Friend has gone from rowdy teenager to a fully grown snow… Thing.

Other than that, we’re working on finishing up the cutscenes before and after the Temple of Seasons boss, so that’s mostly what Teddy has kept himself busy with. Currently, the game ends rather abruptly after finishing the boss – we want the player to return to the collector’s HQ and get a proper message about not being able to continue the main story to avoid confusion.

Oh, and in the next patch, we’ll add proper screenshots to each of the skills that were missing one in their “more info” tab! Yay for no more “no picture (yet)” messages! :)

In case you missed our tweet about it, and doesn’t frequent the forum, the Steam network update is now live on the Frontline beta!

You can either use the interfaces available in-game (as shown above), or use your friend list in the Steam overlay to invite or join friends playing a multiplayer game!

Now that the Steam stuff is all in place (and seems to be running surprisingly smoothly so far), Teddy is finally free to work on other things! The next patch is going to feature a more fleshed out Seasonne, as well as a proper ending for the Temple of Seasons.

Apart from some new interfaces for the new Steam functionality, Vilya has been continuing her work on future portions of the game! Below is the portrait of a young kid who’s going to play a rather important role in events to come (and has come to pass):

Here’s also one of the rooms she’s been working on for the area(s) where said boy will appear:

She also started working on a new piece of promotional artwork, which will serve as our banner(s) on Steam, as well as replace the current character art on the from page of this website! Stay tuned for the finished version of that in next week’s recap :D

Last week we talked briefly about our decision to make our move towards Steam Early Access. This brings a lot of positive things with it, and one of the shiniest additions is the Steam Networking.

One of our main features for Secrets of Grindea has always been the online co-op possibilites. Sadly, evil routers all around the world have made this difficult to setup for a lot of players. With access to to Steam’s own network systems, the days of failed port forwarding and stubborn Hamachi clients will soon be over!

Teddy has spent the entire week working on said networking features and have got it up and running smoothly. Now you’ll be able to simply invite players from your Steam Friends and get a multiplayer game up and running in no time!

The Steam Networking features might do a pit stop in the Frontline beta for some good old bug hunting, before we shuffle it into the Stable beta. We’ll give a heads up before it happens!

Besides multiplayer, the skills have stayed in the spotlight for this week. Besides adding the Gold Charges, we are also reworking some of the skills that have been considered over powered/under powered/just lame overall by ourselves and our player base.

The summons of the game have been in need of buff to amp up their usability. Both the Summon Plant and Frosty Friend skills (Not the Cloud. We all love the Cloud <3) have been reworked to some extent, to hopefully juice them up a bit!

The Summon Plant skill still has the same base mechanics as before (Time based, invulnerable summon that dish out damage) but we’ve done some changes to the charge levels.

The Silver Charge (previously just a beefier version of the basic plant) now has a ranged attack. This small but still significant change hopefully will make the plants more useful later in the game.
The Gold Charge (as of now, things always change) works as a Commander, buffing the rest of the plants in an area around it while being able to dish out good damage on its own.

Unlike the Plant, the Frosty Friend has received some actual changes to its base mechanics. There was not much you could do to avoid losing it during bosses and crowded Arcade Mode rooms, which deterred most players from wanting to spend any skill points on it. In an attempt to help with this, we’ve introduced a Command Menu, giving players some more control over their summon!

Once the Frosty Friend have been summoned, pressing the same button again will no longer desummon it, but instead bring up the Command Menu. From the menu you can give your summon simple commands, with more unlocking as you reach new Charge Levels. Activating the commands will not cost any EP, instead we’ve chosen to go with a Cooldown system. Using a command will render it unusable for a short while.

In the mockup above, the commands visible are Defensive, Aggressive, and Desummon.

Desummon does exactly what you think it does. The Aggressive command puts the Frosty Friend in a aggressive stance, boosting attack damage but lowering defense. Usable for when you find an opening to attack during a boss encounter!

The Defensive command gives Frosty a huuuge defense boost and makes him immobile for a while. You could use this when your summon is in i tricky spot and needs to soak up a lot of damage (an annoying boss attack for example). We’ve talked briefly about giving it Perfect Guard mechanics (maybe it could reset cooldowns!?) but we’re still on the fence about it. What do you guys think?